It's the artistic equivalent of letting the inmates run the asylum. Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s (TFAM) Whose Exhibition Is This? (這是誰的展覽?) brings together 15 artists from across the world who employ photography, video, installation and sculpture to examine how displays of art are produced.
From the museum’s perspective, exhibiting artists are often distracted and egotistical and treat its employees little better than servants, while on the other side, artists regularly feel frustrated by the rules and regulations that exhibiting institutions implement.
But who creates an exhibition? The artist, curator or museum officials?
Judging by the works on display, it seems that the contributors are uninterested in internal museum politics or examining their own behavior. Instead, their works subvert the many prohibitions that TFAM — and by extension all museums — impose on visitors. It’s as though they were told the director had left the building and they could break all the rules.
Taiwanese curator Manray Hsu (徐文瑞) calls on visitors to snap pictures inside the museum, which if caught would normally result in a scolding by security guards. Museumgoers then send their photos to Hsu, who presents them in his installation The Museum in My Camera (偷拍美術館). Submission details in English and Chinese can be found at: tfam-whoseexhibition.blogspot.com.
ONE STORY AT A TIME
Playing on the idea that TFAM is a repository for art, Japanese artist Koki Tanaka is attempting to relocate a public library to the museum.
His verbosely named work, Relocate the Public Library in Taipei by Borrowing One Love Storybook at a Time. Leave the Book in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, consists of a space complete with bookshelves, sofas
and tables.
Visitors are encouraged to borrow “love stories” from public libraries and leave them in the space for others to peruse.
In addition to subverting museum etiquette, Tanaka and Hsu illustrate that TFAM is an evolving entity at which visitors can also become creators.
A rack of postcards makes up India-based Raqs Media Collective’s Please Do Not Touch the Work of Art. The group endeavors to break
down the barrier between audience
and art by urging visitors to take away a postcard.
To create The NCU Project (中央大學計畫), Yeh Wei-li (葉偉立) collaborated with 20 National Central University students who designed their own spaces that the artist then photographed. The work looks at the medium of photography by directing attention to private spaces displayed within the public space of a museum.
Particularly insightful is 25sec-Taipei, a video installation by Berlin-based artists Angelika Middendorf and Andreas Schimanski. The artists recorded the opinions of 41 denizens of Taipei’s artistic community, which they edited down to 25-second snippets. The videos provide a brief though penetrating look into the preoccupations and personalities of the people behind the art.
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